Knowing the origin of data (i.e., where the data was copied or created from)---its provenance---is vital for assessing the
trustworthiness of contemporary scientific databases such as UniProt and SWISS-PROT.
Unfortunately, provenance information must currently be recorded manually, by added effort of the database maintainer. Since such maintenance is tedious and error-prone, it is desirable to provide support for recording provenance in the database system itself. We
review a recent proposal for incorporating such support, as well as its theoretical properties.